High-profile cyberattacks against prominent retailers and banks may be helping newly public CyberArk. Shares have doubled.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica. Other than Time Warner, the parent of CNNMoney, Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie, La Monica does not own positions in any individual stocks.

The Nasdaq was in blood red mode Thursday. But the big drop in tech stocks didn't hurt the performance of a red hot IPO.

No, I'm not talking about Alibaba (BABA). A company called CyberArk Software (CYBR) went public Wednesday. Shares surged nearly 90%. And they rose nearly 10% on Thursday.

So why is this stock being spared from the brutal momentum sell-off? One word: Hacking.

CyberArk develops software designed to protect companies from malicious attacks by cybercriminals, so-called "hacktivists" and even government-sponsored groups engaging in industrial espionage.

Target (TGT). JPMorgan Chase (JPM). Home Depot (HD). All of them have been in the headlines due to security breaches. So it's no wonder that a company like CyberArk would be in demand.

The company's main product helps companies keep "privileged accounts" -- think of things such as log-in info for a big company's IT managers and passwords to social media accounts -- safe. And this looks like a very lucrative business.

Sales rose 30% in 2012 and another 40% last year. And revenue through the first six months of 2014 is up 33% from the same period in 2013.

CyberArk has also been profitable the past few years. It did lose money in the first half of 2014 -- but that was solely due to expenses tied to revaluing warrants ahead of the IPO.

Another plus for the company? It's already a worldwide player in the cybersecurity market. Nearly half of the company's sales come from outside the U.S. (CyberArk is based in Israel and has its U.S. headquarters in Newton, Mass.)

But investors need to be careful before they decide to board the CyberArk. Shares trade at more than 130 times last year's earnings. That's extremely expensive.

The company also faces competition from both pure-play cybersecurity firms such as Palo Alto Networks (PANW) and FireEye (FEYE) as well as subsidiaries of tech giants IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ).

But investors have to do their homework with these companies. Not all of them are going to thrive. Just look at how poorly FireEye's stock has done this year. Palo Alto, on the other hand, has been a Wall Street darling.

So will CyberArk turn out to be more like Palo Alto than FireEye? That's hard to say just yet.

The only thing that's clear is that CyberArk seems to have replaced Alibaba as Wall Street's favorite IPO flavor of the month.

The jury's still out on whether BendGate is a real problem or not. But the company's iOS 8.0.1 update was a disaster. I thought the company was discontinuing the iPod Classic? Maybe Apple needs to give away some free music again. Oh wait. That was a PR nightmare too.

One follower said he was in the uncomfortable position of downloading iOS 8.0.1 right around the time Apple 'fessed up and pulled it. His concern about what might happen next (as well as a follow-up tweet about the Beastie Boys) win him this week's Reader Comment honors.

@LaMonicaBuzz just started update on my Ipad 2 minutes before I saw AAPL pulled it...it might get zapped to another dimension or something

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica. Other than Time Warner, the parent of CNNMoney, Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie, La Monica does not own positions in any individual stocks.

More U.S. consumers have probably used or heard of Citizens Financial Group than Chinese e-commerce wunderkind Alibaba.

Does Alibaba have its name splashed across a baseball stadium in Philadelphia? No. But Citizens does.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica. Other than Time Warner, the parent of CNNMoney, Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie, La Monica does not own positions in any individual stocks.

How's this for meta? The chatter on social media (particularly on Twitter) seems to show that investors are a lot more excited about the Alibaba (BABA) initial public offering than they were for Twitter's (TWTR) MORE

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer may have a spring in her step this morning. Yahoo's stock is higher following the news that Alibaba, the Chinese leader in e-commerce, was preparing to file for an initial public offering in the United States.

Yahoo owns a 24% stake in Alibaba. The stock has been volatile for the past few days due to speculation about a possible IPO filing from Alibaba.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica. Other than Time Warner, the parent of CNNMoney, Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie, La Monica does not own positions in any individual stocks.

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Here's a fun fact: The stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 (SPX), had its strongest performance this year since the Wolf of Wall Street roamed lower Manhattan.

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Facebook shares rallied an impressive 30% Thursday, allowing the stock to book its best one-day gain ever. And while shares remain about 10% below the May 2012 IPO price of $38, analysts are predicting that Facebook is finally on its way to reaching, and even crossing, that threshold.

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Noodles & Co. must be carbo-loading. Shares of the casual restaurant chain have been on quite the run since making their public debut last week.

The stock more than doubled on Friday -- its first trading day -- and is up another 25% Tuesday thanks to kind words from CNBC's Jim Cramer on his Monday evening show. The Mad Money host said that Noodles & Co. (NDLS), which offers dishes ranging from MORE